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Afghan Officials Brief Parliament On Strategic Deal With U.S.
By RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan April 23, 2012
KABUL -- Senior Afghan officials have briefed lawmakers about a finalized draft agreement between Kabul and Washington covering the future of U.S. assistance to Afghanistan.
Foreign Minister Zalmai Rassoul spoke before the Afghan Senate, while Afghan National Security Adviser Rangin Dadfar Spanta briefed the lower house of parliament.
Spanta told lawmakers that Washington has pledged to help defend Afghanistan after NATO's forthcoming withdrawal. Spanta said that the United States is ready to come to Afghanistan's aid against its foes but only with Afghan approval.
He quoted from the pact, saying the United States will use "diplomatic means, political means, economic means, and even military means."
Spanta and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, formally initialed a "final" version of the Strategic Partnership Agreement on April 22.
Although details of the agreement have not been made public, officials say it spells out a framework for future U.S. assistance to Afghanistan for economic development, strengthened security, and improved governance.
The agreement is aimed at easing Afghan fears that the country could be abandoned by the international community as the planned withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan at the end of 2014 approaches.
U.S. and NATO forces moved into Afghanistan more than one decade ago, at the end of 2011, to topple the Taliban regime that was then ruling the country. The invasion was prompted by support the Taliban had given to the Al-Qaeda network, blamed for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States that killed around 3,000 people.
The agreement does not address the numbers or activities of U.S. troops and advisers who could remain in Afghanistan after NATO's planned 2014 withdrawal. The military issue is expected to be covered in a separate Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA).
U.S. President Barack Obama and his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai must review and officially confirm the document.
Concluded Before NATO Summit
Speaking to RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan, Gavin Sundwall, a U.S. Embassy spokesman in Kabul, explained the process leading to the final adoption of the agreement.
"Each side -- the Afghan side and the U.S. side -- will now enter into our respective internal consultations processes on the text," he said. "For the United States, that will mean an interagency review, consultation with Congress as appropriate, and final review by the president of the United States."
Afghan Presidential Spokesman Aimal Faizi said the two sides are expected to conclude the final agreement before NATO's summit in Chicago in late May. Faizi says the Afghan leader will begin a series of consultations this week to persuade Afghan leaders to endorse it.
"Afghan President Karzai will have meeting with various political, religious, and jihadi leaders about the strategic agreement this week," Faizi said. "He will brief them on various aspects of the agreement. These will be part of the final internal consultations in both the countries [before concluding the agreement]."
Negotiations on the Status of Forces Agreement have been stalled for months. U.S. negotiators only recently agreed to Afghan demands to hand over prisons operated by the U.S. military to Afghan control. Washington has also agreed to hand over leadership of night raids by military forces on Afghan homes to Afghan forces.
With reporting by Reuters, AP, and Pajhwok Afghan News
Why Afghanistan's intelligence agency has a major blind spot
Afghanistan's intelligence service is dominated by men from one small province of the country. Has this hampered the Afghan government's ability to infiltrate the insurgency?
By Tom A. Peter | Christian Science Monitor – Mon, Apr 23, 2012
Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS) has been sharply criticized for failing to thwart last week’s series of coordinated attacks in the capital and given the Taliban an effective talking point.
Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai has placed the most weight for the attack intelligence failures on NATO but hasn’t absolved NDS of fault, “I'm not blaming NATO for this. I'm simply asking a question as to the efficiency of our intelligence gathering systems, whether these systems are working all right,” he said in an interview with CNN.
The president’s question is one shared by many Afghans. Though the NDS is relatively well-regarded as an intelligence gathering body, many complain that nepotism and ethnic favoritism – issues that affect most Afghan government offices – could dangerously hobble the capability of the Afghan intelligence agency.
“I would say that there are a lot of people who came into the NDS through political ties. I would also say that there are people not just from one tribe, but from many tribes related to one group,” says Gen. Nazifa Zaki, a member of parliament from Kabul who sits on the internal security commission. “There are professional people who have worked for many years in intelligence, but they are now sidelined.”
How well do you know Afghanistan? Take our quiz.
In a nation that is a patchwork of ethnic groups, many with their own languages, about 70 percent of those at NDS hail from Panjshir or have ties with the Northern Alliance, a group that once opposed the Taliban, say NDS officials.
Additionally, in a recent editorial for the BBC’s Persian language service Amrullah Saleh, a former NDS director wrote that 90 percent of the leadership for Afghanistan’s security forces, which includes NDS, attained their positions through political appointments.
The problem of having an ethnically homogenous spy organization comes into sharp relief against insurgent groups like the Taliban or Haqqani Network, which are almost exclusively Pashtun organizations and have only a handful of supporters from different ethnic groups. Prior to the most recent conflict, Pashtuns have been historic rivals of Panjshiris and the other ethnic groups that make up the Northern Alliance.
Just as the CIA has struggled to make inroads in the Middle East with a shortage of Arab-Americans and Arabic speakers – in 2009, only 22 percent of CIA personnel were not white and just 13 percent were proficient in a language other than English – NDS may face a similar problem in Afghanistan.
Despite a violent history between rival ethnic groups during Afghanistan’s civil war, the past 10 years have seen relative peace between ethnic groups here. Still, while communities mix regularly, barriers do exist.
A common complaint among Pashtuns is that other ethnic groups often fail to differentiate between Pasthuns belonging to the Taliban and the vast majority of Pashtuns who have no ties to the group.
“When they send Panjshiris to Pashtun areas the can’t do anything. They don’t know anything about the South or the East. They don’t know how Pashtuns talk or move. If you need information about a Pashtun, you should have a Pashtun to get that information. This is the problem,” says one NDS officer who is not authorized to speak with the media.
The NDS officer, himself a Pashtun, complained that several years ago he was approached by about 10 men who an insurgent organization had approached to recruit as suicide bombers. The men did not want to become bombers, but they were willing to go to the training camp and collect information for NDS. When he told his superiors, he says they ignored the lead.
Whether the incident was a product of ineffective leadership or Pashtun marginalization, incidents like these do not build confidence in the reputation for the NDS, when it comes to impartiality. Those inside the NDS say that having the organization dominated so heavily by Panjshiris, North Alliance supporters, and political appointees has created an environment where talent and professionalism are seldom rewarded.
“In the NDS or the military it should be really difficult to get a promotion, you shouldn’t get it overnight. You must work hard. But in the NDS someone will join today and tomorrow he will be a major. They just make fake papers and everything. Even if the guy is illiterate, he will become a major in the NDS,” says a former NDS officer who asked to be referred to as Gul Kaka because he is not authorized to speak with the media. “If they become higher ranking, they get more power, money, cars, and everything. They are misusing this.”
NDS officials say that the leadership is aware of the problems and is taking steps to create a more diverse staff. Even those who have voiced complaints, say that there are signs of progress, but add that it will take time.
Zubair Babakarkhail contributed to this report.
US to stay in Afghanistan until 2024
Financial Times By Matthew Green April 22, 2012
Karachi - US forces will stay in Afghanistan until 2024 under a deal aimed at reassuring the Afghan public, regional powers and insurgents that Washington will not abandon Kabul after most foreign troops withdraw.
The agreement was finalised on Sunday after months of fraught negotiations dogged by disputes between Hamid Karzai, the president, and US officials over night raids on insurgents and control of military prisons.
“I have been involved in many international negotiations. I can say without doubt, I have never encountered a tougher negotiator,” said Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador, referring to the Afghan team.
Mr Karzai and Barack Obama, the US president, are due to sign the document at a Nato summit in Chicago next month.
The breakthrough is a boost for Washington, which has faced a series of blows in Afghanistan this year, including co-ordinated attacks on Kabul last weekend, the murder of 17 Afghan civilians, apparently by a US soldier, and riots triggered by the discovery of burned Korans at a US base.
The deal sets the framework for US military and civilian aid to Afghanistan in the decade after 2014, by which time the vast majority of foreign soldiers are due to have returned home.
It forms a pillar of the Obama administration’s exit strategy by ensuring the US can continue to deploy smaller contingents of special forces to hunt militants and advisers to train Afghanistan’s army and police.
The promise of a long-term US military presence is also designed to reassure Afghans who fear the drawdown may trigger a rerun of the international isolation and descent into civil war that followed the Soviet retreat in 1989.
The US hopes the agreement will also encourage wavering allies to stand firm in their commitments to Afghanistan ahead of the Nato summit as well as send a signal of resolve to Taliban commanders.
US officials had feared that any failure to sign the deal before the Chicago gathering would further undermine flagging enthusiasm for the 11-year Afghan campaign among troop-contributing nations.
But the talks gained fresh momentum in recent weeks as negotiators reached a compromise over the transfer of military jails to Afghan control and agreed to give Kabul greater oversight of night raids.
Mr Karzai has long opposed the operations, which US commanders consider their most effective weapon against the Taliban in spite of the anger they cause among the president’s ethnic Pashtun community.
The document, which was not made public, does not govern the precise numbers of troops or quantity of aid Afghanistan will receive, but sets the broad outlines of the two country’s relationship.
The US has already begun withdrawing about a third of its Afghan deployment, which peaked at almost 100,000 troops. The White House has yet to announce the pace and scope of further reductions in the run-up to the completion of the security handover in 2014.
With Pact, U.S. Agrees to Help Afghans for Years to Come
New York Times By ALISSA J. RUBIN April 22, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - After months of negotiations, the United States and Afghanistan completed drafts of a strategic partnership agreement on Sunday that pledges American support for Afghanistan for 10 years after the withdrawal of combat troops at the end of 2014.
The agreement, whose text was not released, represents an important moment when the United States begins the transition from being the predominant foreign force in Afghanistan to serving a more traditional role of supportive ally.
By broadly redefining the relationship between Afghanistan and the United States, the deal builds on hard-won new understandings the two countries reached in recent weeks on the thorny issues of detainees and Special Operations raids. It covers social and economic development, institution building, regional cooperation and security.
The talks to reach the agreement were intense. At times they broke down altogether, primarily because of geopolitical frictions in the region from two powerful neighbors, Iran and Pakistan. Each country opposes long-term American ties with Afghanistan.
The American and Afghan negotiators have been working hard in recent days to complete the draft so that it could be signed before a NATO conference in Chicago on May 20. There, decisions are to be made on how much money and support will be provided to the Afghan security forces after 2014 and by whom.
Lacking certainty about a long-term American commitment to Afghanistan, some countries were holding back, waiting to see what the United States, the leader in shaping Afghan policy, would do. Western diplomats said Sunday that the allies would now be more willing to make commitments.
The agreement — sweeping by design, with few details to bog down negotiators — puts down in writing for the first time the nature of the relationship the United States will have with Afghanistan once the bulk of American troops go home. It is meant to reassure the Afghan people that the United States will not abandon them, to warn the Taliban not to assume that they can wait out the West, and to send a message to Pakistan, which American officials believe has been hedging its bets in the belief that an American departure would leave the Taliban in charge.
“This is the proof in the pudding that we intend to be there,” one United States official said Sunday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
The agreement came despite a series of setbacks in Afghan-American relations, including the burning of Korans, the massacre of 16 civilians attributed to a lone Army sergeant, and the appearance of grisly photos of American soldiers posing with the body parts of Afghan insurgents.
“In the midst of all these meteor strikes, we were able to still sit down across the table and get these documents agreed to,” one NATO official noted. Many Afghans, including some who are ambivalent about the American presence, believe that the country’s survival is tied to having such an agreement with Washington. They say it will make clear to the Taliban and to regional powers that the Americans will not walk away the way they did in the 1990s after the Soviets were pushed out of the country.
A loya jirga, or traditional council, convened by President Hamid Karzai last fall strongly urged the government to sign a long-term agreement with the United States.
The draft agreement was initialed by Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, and Rangin Spanta, the Afghan national security adviser, at a meeting of the Afghan national security council on Sunday. It will now be sent to Mr. Karzai and to the Afghan Parliament for review and approval, and also to President Obama and the White House. It will become final when signed by the two presidents, according to American and Afghan officials.
Western diplomats in Kabul said the agreement was an important marker and a positive one, both because it would help persuade other Western countries to continue to support Afghanistan and because it will signal all sides, including the Taliban, that they will not have a free hand to manipulate the country after 2014.
“The Iranians don’t like it because it shows the U.S. is going to be here for a long time,” said a European diplomat here who noted that the Taliban would not like it for the same reason. “This is important because they cannot tell their soldiers now just to sit it out and wait for 2014.”
The Taliban responded to the draft agreement within minutes, issuing a detailed statement condemning it as a giveaway to the Americans.
The goals of the agreement for the Americans, the Taliban statement said, are: “First goal: securing routes to the Central Asian and Caspian oil fields. Second goal: prevention of a movement in favor of a true Islamic government. Third goal: Bringing secularism and liberalism to Afghanistan. Fourth goal: establishing an army hostile to Islam that protects Western interests. Fifth goal: Continuous threats to Islamic countries in the region and the prevention of political and military ties between them and Afghanistan.”
In many respects the strategic partnership agreement is more symbolic than substantive. It does not lay out specific dollar amounts of aid or name programs that the Americans will support; the financing must be authorized and appropriated by Congress from year to year.
Nor does it lay out specifically what the American military and security presence will be after 2014 or what role it will play. A more detailed security agreement is to come later, perhaps in the next year, Western diplomats said, once it becomes clear how much support European nations will give to the Afghan security forces.
Even so, the United States expects to make substantial contributions toward the cost of Afghanistan’s security forces beyond 2014. A total figure for the United States of $2.7 billion a year has been discussed, and it could easily be more; there would most likely be aid for civilian programs as well.
That would be a steep reduction from the amount the United States now spends here, which has been $110 billion to $120 billion a year since the “surge” in American troop levels began in 2010, according to the Congressional Research Service.
For the partnership to work, the Afghan government must follow through with political reforms, particularly in fighting corruption, said Brian Katulis, a national security expert at the Center for American Progress. “U.S. taxpayers have seen tens of millions of their dollars wasted by a corrupt and ineffective Afghan government over the past decade,” Mr. Katulis said. “Any transition plan needs to demand more responsibility from our Afghan partners.”
Officials declined Sunday to release the text of the draft strategic partnership deal or comment on it in detail. “Until the agreement is finalized, we’re not in a position to discuss the elements it contains,” said Gavin Sundwall, the American Embassy spokesman in Kabul.
“Our goal is an enduring partnership with Afghanistan that strengthens Afghan sovereignty, stability and prosperity and that contributes to the shared goal of defeating Al Qaeda and its extremist allies,” he said. “We believe the agreement supports that goal.”
The talks on the agreement were delayed repeatedly over the delicate issues of night raids by American troops and the American operation of detention facilities. Ultimately, negotiators agreed to prepare detailed side agreements on those two issues. In March the two sides signed a memorandum of understanding shifting responsibility for all detention facilities in the country to the Afghans, and earlier this month they handed final authority over night raids to Afghan security forces, who are now carrying out all raids unless American assistance is requested.
With those two issues resolved, the strategic partnership was completed quickly.
Graham Bowley contributed reporting from Kabul, and Helene Cooper and Steven Lee Myers from Washington.
Romney’s Vague and Frustrating Views on Afghanistan
Bloomberg By the Editors Apr 23, 2012
Mitt Romney’s position on the war in Afghanistan will be familiar to those who have followed him, or tried to, on health-care reform.
In both cases -- two of the biggest domestic and foreign policy issues of this year’s election campaign -- he criticizes President Barack Obama for essentially having the same policy as Romney himself.
In the case of health care, Romney, as governor of Massachusetts, led the way to enactment of a plan centered on the notorious (to Republicans, anyway) “individual mandate.” He even offered to advise Obama on how a similar plan might be implemented nationally. Romney now says the Obama plan, individual mandate and all, is dreadful, and he promises to stop the whole thing in its tracks his first day as president.
In the case of the war in Afghanistan, started by President George W. Bush and pursued with determination by Obama, Romney has not reversed his former views, possibly because he is new to the foreign policy game and has no former views. His current views, insofar as they can be divined, again appear almost identical to Obama’s -- and where they’re not, are contradictory.
Both men favor a deadline for withdrawal of American troops. Both say that deadline should be the end of 2014. Both acknowledge that some small number of troops will have to remain indefinitely. Romney has also said, as Obama has not, that full withdrawal should happen only when U.S. generals approve or “as soon as that mission is complete.”
So is Romney in favor of full withdrawal by 2014 or is he not? If anything is clear in Afghanistan, it is that the U.S. mission will not be complete by the end of 2014. As president, Romney would face the same dismaying choice that Obama faces: He could pull out our troops and end the war by the deadline (or earlier, as we have advocated). That could risk appearing -- and not just appearing -- to slink away in humiliation. Or, he could stay until “the mission is complete,” which could be many years or even never.
What happens if, as has happened with every other Western mission to civilize Afghanistan in recent centuries, we fail to accomplish our mission in the time we have set for it? Romney says that setting a deadline for withdrawal is a gift to our enemies. They now know that they just have to hold out for a couple more years in a war that has been going on since 2001. If the Obama administration didn’t set a deadline, Republicans would accuse them of failing to have an “exit strategy” in Afghanistan.
Romney -- who, as we know from other issues, has the entire spectrum of possible opinions available to him -- has not clearly said where he stands. This is a policy question, not a military one. “Leave it to the generals” is not an acceptable answer in our democracy.
“We should not negotiate with the Taliban,” Romney says. “We should defeat the Taliban.” On this one aspect of the perplexing Afghanistan war, there is a real disagreement, because the Obama administration is in fact negotiating, albeit episodically, with the Taliban.
This is pretty appalling, but so are all the other options. Of course we should defeat the Taliban. We also should cure world hunger. You don’t get credit for wishing. The U.S. has spent nearly 11 years so far, not to mention hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of young lives, trying to defeat the Taliban. How much American blood and treasure is Romney prepared to spend?
To contact the Bloomberg View editorial board: view@bloomberg.net.
US congressman refused entry to Afghanistan over criticisms of Karzai
Renewed tension between Washington and Kabul after Afghan president tells Dana Rohrabacher he would not be welcome
Guardian.co.uk By Ewen MacAskill in Washington and Emma Graham-Harrison in Kabul Sunday 22 April 2012
Relations between the US and Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, came under renewed strain after a senior Congressman highly critical of the Kabul government was barred from entering Afghanistan.
Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, Republican chairman of the House foreign affairs subcommittee on oversight and investigation, has been an outspoken opponent of Karzai. Rohrabacher has engaged with other Afghan leaders about a more decentralised form of government for Afghanistan and called for a US investigation into alleged government corruption.
He had been leading a delegation to Afghanistan but was stopped in Dubai on Friday on his way to Kabul. The other members of the delegation had visas for Afghanistan but Rohrabacher did not.
According to his press spokeswoman, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, personally intervened to convey a message from Karzai that the congressman would not be welcome and asking him not to continue to Kabul.
Rohrabacher was still in Dubai on Sunday but scheduled to depart on Monday.
Karzai has repeatedly infuriated the Obama administration with his sharp public criticism of the US, even as Washington spends billions of dollars on security and aid in Afghanistan.
Blocking entry to a member of Congress adds to the growing tally of incidents that have strained ties.
"This doesn't look great a month before Chicago," a senior diplomat in Kabul said.
Nato is due to hold discussions at the Chicago summit next month on future relations with Afghanistan, and the US and its allies are expected to seal an agreement for long-term funding of the Afghan police and army.
Tara Olivia Setmayer, communications director for Rohrabacher, said: "Karzai told the state department he was not welcome and secretary Clinton personally conveyed that sentiment to Mr Rohrabacher and asked him not to continue on to Kabul with his fellow members. Out of respect, he obliged."
Setmayer said Rohrabacher had been a vocal critic of government corruption and "the US's failed strategy of foisting a western-style democracy from a central government in Kabul. He has advocated involving the former Northern Alliance factions in the government, much to the chagrin of Karzai."
Rohrabacher has been in discussion with Afghan leaders for several months about a less centralised form of government. In January the Afghan foreign ministry criticised what they saw as interference by the congressman in Afghanistan's domestic affairs, after a meeting with several opposition leaders in Berlin.
Rohrabacher has had a long and colourful association with Afghanistan dating back to the 1980s when he accompanied mujahideen forces fighting the Soviet Union. He became personal friends with many of the commanders who, with the support of US forces, toppled the Taliban government. Among them was Uzbek leader Abdul Rashid Dostum with whom Rohrabacher remains in dialogue, and whom the delegation met on Sunday.
10 years in Afghanistan - what did we achieve?
ABC Online By Mungo MacCallum 23 April 2012
So after more than 10 tortuous years, we finally have an exit strategy for Afghanistan – a firm (well, more or less) date for bringing our troops (well, most of them) home (well, for the moment at least).
Actually we have had one for quite some time: our exit strategy has always been 'as soon as bloody possible', which in practice has meant 'about two nanoseconds after Washington gives us the green light'. And that signal has now been given.
It is easy to be cynical about the timing: Barack Obama has set the timetable as he is launching into a difficult election year, and of course Julia Gillard faces an even tougher test at the polls in 2013 – when she hopes and believes most of the Australian troops will be welcomed home and the ones left behind will be out of the firing line and therefore largely out of harm's way.
But in fact the revised schedule has been set less by politics than by operational reality. There is a growing conviction among the military that the situation on the ground now is about as good as it is ever going to get, and with antagonism between the Afghans, both military and civilian, and the foreign forces now reaching levels so fierce as to occasionally become murderous, not much can be achieved by hanging in there.
It is time to declare victory, and leave – not a withdrawal, but what we now call a transition. But to what?
No one really believes that Afghan forces are ready to take over the defence of the country, or even that they really want to; no one believes that the government in Kabul is other than weak and corrupt and that president Hamid Karzai will not sell out to the Taliban (or anyone else) in order to preserve his personal advantage, if not his life.
And no one any longer pretends that Afghanistan is now, or probably ever will be, on the way to becoming a functioning democracy. If this mad adventure has done nothing else, it must surely have convinced the Americans that their 20th century ambition of imposing regime change on recalcitrant nations through invasion and occupation has become an unrealisable fantasy.
Yet it started so well; after World War II the defeated dictatorships fell into line with amazing alacrity. Germany (well, the half occupied by the Americans) and Italy swiftly resumed their pre-war parliamentary systems, with Germany, in particular, becoming something of a role model for the social democrats of the world.
OK, they had always been part of the Western tradition; but how about Japan, whose near-feudalism was fully democratised in less than a generation?
True, but it had been virtually obliterated as a vital part of the process. When the American occupation began, the country was effectively a political blank: the only remaining link with the past was the emperor, now no more than a conduit to repeat (or rather proclaim) the orders of General Douglas Macarthur to an utterly subservient populace.
In other words, yes, you can impose your chosen system on any country, if you're prepared to drop a couple of nukes first. But since America is no longer the only country that has them, this option has become unacceptably risky.
And every attempt since to export the American way by force of arms - in South America, in Asia, and particularly in the Middle East - has ended in tears.
Even most neo-cons now reluctantly accept that democracy cannot be enforced from outside; that it has to be embraced by the people themselves to give it even half a chance. And when it does evolve, it is usually as a result of uprisings against despotic regimes which have been both long-lasting (and therefore stable) and, importantly, secular.
This was the case in South Africa, in the communist states of Europe, in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and now Syria.
In some instances it has worked and in others it may yet work; in at least one case (Iran, where a secular dictatorship was replaced by an even more brutal religious one) it has obviously not. But it seems to be the only way.
As Marxists used to accept that capitalism, distasteful as it was, was a necessary step between feudalism and socialism, so Americans may have to learn that a Hussein, a Gaddafi or an Assad is needed as a catalyst towards democracy.
And when the push for democracy emerges, it can certainly use a little help from its friends in the outside world, but not, repeat not, an armed invasion, still less prolonged occupation.
Both sides will eventually turn against the interlopers, becoming what are quaintly described as 'insurgents' (hey, they're the ones that live there) until the foreigners leave – at which point, of course, they become freedom-fighters, liberators.
In fact, the foreign forces may well do more to upset the progress towards democracy than to help. Arguably, that has been another legacy of Afghanistan.
So, apart from this hard lesson, what has been achieved? At least the original war aims have been realised: Osama bin Laden is dead and Al Qaeda has been dispersed, although certainly not dispatched.
But that's about it. In the process Pakistan has become less stable and less predictable, and as a nuclear power far more dangerous than Afghanistan ever was or will be. And of course in Afghanistan itself it will be business as usual, constant tribal warfare with the Taliban the only force with a hope of final victory.
A grim prognosis, and one that hasn't really changed in the last 10 years, years which have seen 32 more Australian sacrificed to ill-thought-out American adventurism.
Next time we might look past all the pseudo-patriotic bombast, the sanctimonious blather, and realise that there was only ever one sensible way to support our troops in Afghanistan: bring them home.
McManus: A smaller, smarter military
The best-equipped army in the world can still lose a war if it doesn't understand the people it's fighting.
Los Angles Times By Doyle McManus Op-Ed April 22, 2012
President Obama has called a halt to the decade-long rise in defense spending that began after Sept. 11, and has proposed shrinking the Army and Marine Corps by about 14%.
Congressional Republicans (not to mention Mitt Romney) say that would be disastrous and that it could jeopardize American troops abroad.
But the military brass has stood behind Obama — literally. When the president announced his proposals, the Joint Chiefs of Staff lined up behind him in the Pentagon's briefing room. There has been no audible dissent from the officer corps.
Last week I sat down with the chief of the service that's taking the deepest hits, Gen. Raymond T. Odierno of the Army, to try to see the budget issues from a soldier's perspective.
His take? He doesn't relish shrinking the Army he has served in since 1972, but he accepts the need for a cap on spending growth.
"In all the learning I've ever done since I was a cadet at West Point, one of the things I found out is that the underpinning of any strong society is its economic capability and its political system," he said.
"It's essential that we do play [a part] in helping to get our budget right, to get our economy moving, to ensure that we reduce spending. And that's what we're doing.
"Would I have rather seen the budget cuts a bit less? Probably," he said, suggesting that the Army might come back next year and ask for some spending to be restored.
The Army is slated to shrink by 80,000 troops, more than any other service. But Odierno points out that the Army also grew more than any other branch of the armed forces during the last decade. The proposed cuts would still leave the Army slightly larger than it was in 2001, with 490,000 active-duty troops.
"Some people say, well, the Army is the loser. In my mind I call it a rebalancing," he said. "We're now bringing our end strength back to where I think it needs to be. I feel comfortable with that."
Ask this bull-necked artillery officer what new initiatives get him excited, and he doesn't talk about new tanks or combat helicopters; in this budget, the Army isn't getting them.
Instead, he talks about a new doctoral program to train officers in strategic planning, and he talks about educating more officers to become experts on Asia and the Middle East, about "cultural awareness" and "the human domain."
One of the chief lessons he learned during his three combat tours in Iraq, Odierno said, is that the best-equipped army in the world can still lose a war if it doesn't understand the people it's fighting.
"There's so much we don't know," he said.
When Odierno first arrived in Iraq during the U.S. invasion in 2003, he thought his mission was straightforward: to hunt down Saddam Hussein and the remnants of his regime. He led his 4th Infantry Division in massive sweeps of the Sunni provinces north of Baghdad and captured thousands of prisoners, including Hussein.
But that overwhelming-force, take-many-prisoners style of campaign didn't lead to peace and democracy; instead, it helped stir up the insurgency against U.S. forces that exploded in 2004.
Odierno initially defended his muscular strategy, but he decided on reflection that he was wrong and that a more sophisticated form of counterinsurgency aimed at winning Iraqis' trust and allegiance would have been a far better approach.
In 2006, Odierno and other military leaders changed course, forming an alliance with former insurgents in Anbar province and launching a surge in Baghdad. These initiatives helped bring the war under control.
The important thing, he concluded, was "understanding the environment, understanding the fabric that's beneath a society" — knowledge he didn't have when he arrived in Iraq in 2003.
If Army officers know more about the countries where they fight, in other words, they can do counterinsurgency better, and with fewer troops.
"The more we understand the human domain, the less people it will take," he said.
Odierno's emphasis on regional expertise also informs the approach he thinks the Pentagon should take in Asia, as the Obama administration shifts the focus of foreign policy toward the Pacific, where the Navy has historically ruled.
"Seven out of 10 of the world's largest land armies are in Asia," he points out. "In every country, the predominant service is the army." If the United States wants to build relationships with Asian military establishments, the officers who will have the easiest time doing that will come from the U.S. Army, he says.
Up to now, history has remembered generals by the campaigns they fought. By that measure, Odierno has already made his mark through the successful surge in Iraq he helped orchestrate.
But ultimately, he may be remembered primarily for something less dramatic but more important: using the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan to create a smaller but smarter force.
If he can pull that off, he'll deserve the oil portrait he's already guaranteed on the wall of the Pentagon's Army corridor.
doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com
Afghan carpet industry is threadbare
By Mushtaq Mojaddidi AFP 22/04/2012
For decades Ismail Temorzada's handmade Afghan carpets decorated people's homes around the world, but export problems and competition from Iran's machine-made products have left his business threadbare.
"My carpet sales are down, no one is buying hand-made carpets anymore," says Temorzada, 45, who has run a shop for more than 20 years in Kabul's once crowded and colourful Chicken Street bazaar.
"Iranian machine-made carpets are imported to Afghanistan at a cheaper price," he told AFP, dismissing them as lacking originality, durability and charm.
But they are cheap and people buy them, and his sales have dropped by 70 percent over the past year, he says.
Carpets are Afghanistan's best known export, woven mostly by women in the north of the country.
Displaying his best carpets, from Andkhoy in northern Faryab province, Temorzada said they cost 60,000 Afghanis -- about $1,300 -- but nobody is buying them now.
He wants the government to ban the importation of machine-made carpets from Iran -- or at least impose a steep hike in the import duty.
"Recently, Afghan carpet businessmen had a meeting with President Hamid Karzai and the president told us that if we ban their carpets then they will ban all their products to Afghanistan.
"If we cannot ban the Iranian machine-made carpets we should increase the duty on the product from $10 a metre to $100, so that they cannot be imported to Afghanistan in great numbers and slowly will be reduced."
Temorzada also wants the government of the landlocked and war-torn country to help the industry export its own products directly to clients around the world.
At the moment, transport problems mean that most carpets are sent to neighbouring Pakistan for washing and cutting and are often then shipped abroad under Pakistani labels.
Afghan carpet making used to employ directly or indirectly six million people, or a fifth of the country's population, according to the export promotion agency of Afghanistan -- but that figure has dropped sharply.
"The Afghan carpet industry is totally dependent on the international market," Mohammad Zarif Yadgari, deputy director of the Afghan Carpet Exporters' Guild told AFP.
"There is no direct access (to sell) abroad -- if we export carpets they will be sent abroad from Pakistan through middlemen."
The value of carpet exports fell from $262 million in 2007 to $149 million in 2008, according to the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce and Industries (ACCI).
In 2010, nearly 400,000 square metres of carpets worth $48 million were sold, but this dropped by half last year.
However, while some businesses suffer, others are thriving.
"Since I brought Iranian machine-made carpets my business has boomed," said Kabul carpet dealer Mohammad Muzamil Yousufzai.
"Because they are cheap and are sold at a reasonable price everyone can afford to buy them.
The Afghan government says it is making moves to help local carpet makers.
"The government has started work on the construction of industrial parks for carpet businessmen for washing and scissoring," Motasil Komaki, deputy commerce and industries minister, told AFP.
Describing carpets as "Afghanistan's national industry", he said the parks would initially be built in four provinces -- Faryab, Balkh, Herat and Jawzjan.
Weaving carpets was a main source of income for the millions of Afghans who fled to neighbouring Pakistan during Afghanistan's years of war, notably the 1990s civil conflict that was followed by Taliban rule.
About 80 percent of the exiles have returned home since the ouster of the Taliban government in 2001 and now a large portion of Pakistan's carpets are made in Afghanistan but sold as Pakistani, according to government figures.
Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, can ill afford to lose its main industry. Its economy has been supported by huge infusions of Western cash for the past decade as 130,000 US-led NATO troops help President Hamid Karzai's government fight a Taliban insurgency.
Kabul this month saw its biggest coordinated militant attacks in 10 years of war, leaving 51 dead after explosions and gunfire rocked the capital in a brutal reminder of how severe the security threat is.
But the troops are due to leave by the end of 2014, and the economy is expected to be hit hard.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
By RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan April 23, 2012
KABUL -- Senior Afghan officials have briefed lawmakers about a finalized draft agreement between Kabul and Washington covering the future of U.S. assistance to Afghanistan.
Foreign Minister Zalmai Rassoul spoke before the Afghan Senate, while Afghan National Security Adviser Rangin Dadfar Spanta briefed the lower house of parliament.
Spanta told lawmakers that Washington has pledged to help defend Afghanistan after NATO's forthcoming withdrawal. Spanta said that the United States is ready to come to Afghanistan's aid against its foes but only with Afghan approval.
He quoted from the pact, saying the United States will use "diplomatic means, political means, economic means, and even military means."
Spanta and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, formally initialed a "final" version of the Strategic Partnership Agreement on April 22.
Although details of the agreement have not been made public, officials say it spells out a framework for future U.S. assistance to Afghanistan for economic development, strengthened security, and improved governance.
The agreement is aimed at easing Afghan fears that the country could be abandoned by the international community as the planned withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan at the end of 2014 approaches.
U.S. and NATO forces moved into Afghanistan more than one decade ago, at the end of 2011, to topple the Taliban regime that was then ruling the country. The invasion was prompted by support the Taliban had given to the Al-Qaeda network, blamed for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States that killed around 3,000 people.
The agreement does not address the numbers or activities of U.S. troops and advisers who could remain in Afghanistan after NATO's planned 2014 withdrawal. The military issue is expected to be covered in a separate Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA).
U.S. President Barack Obama and his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai must review and officially confirm the document.
Concluded Before NATO Summit
Speaking to RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan, Gavin Sundwall, a U.S. Embassy spokesman in Kabul, explained the process leading to the final adoption of the agreement.
"Each side -- the Afghan side and the U.S. side -- will now enter into our respective internal consultations processes on the text," he said. "For the United States, that will mean an interagency review, consultation with Congress as appropriate, and final review by the president of the United States."
Afghan Presidential Spokesman Aimal Faizi said the two sides are expected to conclude the final agreement before NATO's summit in Chicago in late May. Faizi says the Afghan leader will begin a series of consultations this week to persuade Afghan leaders to endorse it.
"Afghan President Karzai will have meeting with various political, religious, and jihadi leaders about the strategic agreement this week," Faizi said. "He will brief them on various aspects of the agreement. These will be part of the final internal consultations in both the countries [before concluding the agreement]."
Negotiations on the Status of Forces Agreement have been stalled for months. U.S. negotiators only recently agreed to Afghan demands to hand over prisons operated by the U.S. military to Afghan control. Washington has also agreed to hand over leadership of night raids by military forces on Afghan homes to Afghan forces.
With reporting by Reuters, AP, and Pajhwok Afghan News
Why Afghanistan's intelligence agency has a major blind spot
Afghanistan's intelligence service is dominated by men from one small province of the country. Has this hampered the Afghan government's ability to infiltrate the insurgency?
By Tom A. Peter | Christian Science Monitor – Mon, Apr 23, 2012
Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS) has been sharply criticized for failing to thwart last week’s series of coordinated attacks in the capital and given the Taliban an effective talking point.
Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai has placed the most weight for the attack intelligence failures on NATO but hasn’t absolved NDS of fault, “I'm not blaming NATO for this. I'm simply asking a question as to the efficiency of our intelligence gathering systems, whether these systems are working all right,” he said in an interview with CNN.
The president’s question is one shared by many Afghans. Though the NDS is relatively well-regarded as an intelligence gathering body, many complain that nepotism and ethnic favoritism – issues that affect most Afghan government offices – could dangerously hobble the capability of the Afghan intelligence agency.
“I would say that there are a lot of people who came into the NDS through political ties. I would also say that there are people not just from one tribe, but from many tribes related to one group,” says Gen. Nazifa Zaki, a member of parliament from Kabul who sits on the internal security commission. “There are professional people who have worked for many years in intelligence, but they are now sidelined.”
How well do you know Afghanistan? Take our quiz.
In a nation that is a patchwork of ethnic groups, many with their own languages, about 70 percent of those at NDS hail from Panjshir or have ties with the Northern Alliance, a group that once opposed the Taliban, say NDS officials.
Additionally, in a recent editorial for the BBC’s Persian language service Amrullah Saleh, a former NDS director wrote that 90 percent of the leadership for Afghanistan’s security forces, which includes NDS, attained their positions through political appointments.
The problem of having an ethnically homogenous spy organization comes into sharp relief against insurgent groups like the Taliban or Haqqani Network, which are almost exclusively Pashtun organizations and have only a handful of supporters from different ethnic groups. Prior to the most recent conflict, Pashtuns have been historic rivals of Panjshiris and the other ethnic groups that make up the Northern Alliance.
Just as the CIA has struggled to make inroads in the Middle East with a shortage of Arab-Americans and Arabic speakers – in 2009, only 22 percent of CIA personnel were not white and just 13 percent were proficient in a language other than English – NDS may face a similar problem in Afghanistan.
Despite a violent history between rival ethnic groups during Afghanistan’s civil war, the past 10 years have seen relative peace between ethnic groups here. Still, while communities mix regularly, barriers do exist.
A common complaint among Pashtuns is that other ethnic groups often fail to differentiate between Pasthuns belonging to the Taliban and the vast majority of Pashtuns who have no ties to the group.
“When they send Panjshiris to Pashtun areas the can’t do anything. They don’t know anything about the South or the East. They don’t know how Pashtuns talk or move. If you need information about a Pashtun, you should have a Pashtun to get that information. This is the problem,” says one NDS officer who is not authorized to speak with the media.
The NDS officer, himself a Pashtun, complained that several years ago he was approached by about 10 men who an insurgent organization had approached to recruit as suicide bombers. The men did not want to become bombers, but they were willing to go to the training camp and collect information for NDS. When he told his superiors, he says they ignored the lead.
Whether the incident was a product of ineffective leadership or Pashtun marginalization, incidents like these do not build confidence in the reputation for the NDS, when it comes to impartiality. Those inside the NDS say that having the organization dominated so heavily by Panjshiris, North Alliance supporters, and political appointees has created an environment where talent and professionalism are seldom rewarded.
“In the NDS or the military it should be really difficult to get a promotion, you shouldn’t get it overnight. You must work hard. But in the NDS someone will join today and tomorrow he will be a major. They just make fake papers and everything. Even if the guy is illiterate, he will become a major in the NDS,” says a former NDS officer who asked to be referred to as Gul Kaka because he is not authorized to speak with the media. “If they become higher ranking, they get more power, money, cars, and everything. They are misusing this.”
NDS officials say that the leadership is aware of the problems and is taking steps to create a more diverse staff. Even those who have voiced complaints, say that there are signs of progress, but add that it will take time.
Zubair Babakarkhail contributed to this report.
US to stay in Afghanistan until 2024
Financial Times By Matthew Green April 22, 2012
Karachi - US forces will stay in Afghanistan until 2024 under a deal aimed at reassuring the Afghan public, regional powers and insurgents that Washington will not abandon Kabul after most foreign troops withdraw.
The agreement was finalised on Sunday after months of fraught negotiations dogged by disputes between Hamid Karzai, the president, and US officials over night raids on insurgents and control of military prisons.
“I have been involved in many international negotiations. I can say without doubt, I have never encountered a tougher negotiator,” said Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador, referring to the Afghan team.
Mr Karzai and Barack Obama, the US president, are due to sign the document at a Nato summit in Chicago next month.
The breakthrough is a boost for Washington, which has faced a series of blows in Afghanistan this year, including co-ordinated attacks on Kabul last weekend, the murder of 17 Afghan civilians, apparently by a US soldier, and riots triggered by the discovery of burned Korans at a US base.
The deal sets the framework for US military and civilian aid to Afghanistan in the decade after 2014, by which time the vast majority of foreign soldiers are due to have returned home.
It forms a pillar of the Obama administration’s exit strategy by ensuring the US can continue to deploy smaller contingents of special forces to hunt militants and advisers to train Afghanistan’s army and police.
The promise of a long-term US military presence is also designed to reassure Afghans who fear the drawdown may trigger a rerun of the international isolation and descent into civil war that followed the Soviet retreat in 1989.
The US hopes the agreement will also encourage wavering allies to stand firm in their commitments to Afghanistan ahead of the Nato summit as well as send a signal of resolve to Taliban commanders.
US officials had feared that any failure to sign the deal before the Chicago gathering would further undermine flagging enthusiasm for the 11-year Afghan campaign among troop-contributing nations.
But the talks gained fresh momentum in recent weeks as negotiators reached a compromise over the transfer of military jails to Afghan control and agreed to give Kabul greater oversight of night raids.
Mr Karzai has long opposed the operations, which US commanders consider their most effective weapon against the Taliban in spite of the anger they cause among the president’s ethnic Pashtun community.
The document, which was not made public, does not govern the precise numbers of troops or quantity of aid Afghanistan will receive, but sets the broad outlines of the two country’s relationship.
The US has already begun withdrawing about a third of its Afghan deployment, which peaked at almost 100,000 troops. The White House has yet to announce the pace and scope of further reductions in the run-up to the completion of the security handover in 2014.
With Pact, U.S. Agrees to Help Afghans for Years to Come
New York Times By ALISSA J. RUBIN April 22, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - After months of negotiations, the United States and Afghanistan completed drafts of a strategic partnership agreement on Sunday that pledges American support for Afghanistan for 10 years after the withdrawal of combat troops at the end of 2014.
The agreement, whose text was not released, represents an important moment when the United States begins the transition from being the predominant foreign force in Afghanistan to serving a more traditional role of supportive ally.
By broadly redefining the relationship between Afghanistan and the United States, the deal builds on hard-won new understandings the two countries reached in recent weeks on the thorny issues of detainees and Special Operations raids. It covers social and economic development, institution building, regional cooperation and security.
The talks to reach the agreement were intense. At times they broke down altogether, primarily because of geopolitical frictions in the region from two powerful neighbors, Iran and Pakistan. Each country opposes long-term American ties with Afghanistan.
The American and Afghan negotiators have been working hard in recent days to complete the draft so that it could be signed before a NATO conference in Chicago on May 20. There, decisions are to be made on how much money and support will be provided to the Afghan security forces after 2014 and by whom.
Lacking certainty about a long-term American commitment to Afghanistan, some countries were holding back, waiting to see what the United States, the leader in shaping Afghan policy, would do. Western diplomats said Sunday that the allies would now be more willing to make commitments.
The agreement — sweeping by design, with few details to bog down negotiators — puts down in writing for the first time the nature of the relationship the United States will have with Afghanistan once the bulk of American troops go home. It is meant to reassure the Afghan people that the United States will not abandon them, to warn the Taliban not to assume that they can wait out the West, and to send a message to Pakistan, which American officials believe has been hedging its bets in the belief that an American departure would leave the Taliban in charge.
“This is the proof in the pudding that we intend to be there,” one United States official said Sunday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
The agreement came despite a series of setbacks in Afghan-American relations, including the burning of Korans, the massacre of 16 civilians attributed to a lone Army sergeant, and the appearance of grisly photos of American soldiers posing with the body parts of Afghan insurgents.
“In the midst of all these meteor strikes, we were able to still sit down across the table and get these documents agreed to,” one NATO official noted. Many Afghans, including some who are ambivalent about the American presence, believe that the country’s survival is tied to having such an agreement with Washington. They say it will make clear to the Taliban and to regional powers that the Americans will not walk away the way they did in the 1990s after the Soviets were pushed out of the country.
A loya jirga, or traditional council, convened by President Hamid Karzai last fall strongly urged the government to sign a long-term agreement with the United States.
The draft agreement was initialed by Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, and Rangin Spanta, the Afghan national security adviser, at a meeting of the Afghan national security council on Sunday. It will now be sent to Mr. Karzai and to the Afghan Parliament for review and approval, and also to President Obama and the White House. It will become final when signed by the two presidents, according to American and Afghan officials.
Western diplomats in Kabul said the agreement was an important marker and a positive one, both because it would help persuade other Western countries to continue to support Afghanistan and because it will signal all sides, including the Taliban, that they will not have a free hand to manipulate the country after 2014.
“The Iranians don’t like it because it shows the U.S. is going to be here for a long time,” said a European diplomat here who noted that the Taliban would not like it for the same reason. “This is important because they cannot tell their soldiers now just to sit it out and wait for 2014.”
The Taliban responded to the draft agreement within minutes, issuing a detailed statement condemning it as a giveaway to the Americans.
The goals of the agreement for the Americans, the Taliban statement said, are: “First goal: securing routes to the Central Asian and Caspian oil fields. Second goal: prevention of a movement in favor of a true Islamic government. Third goal: Bringing secularism and liberalism to Afghanistan. Fourth goal: establishing an army hostile to Islam that protects Western interests. Fifth goal: Continuous threats to Islamic countries in the region and the prevention of political and military ties between them and Afghanistan.”
In many respects the strategic partnership agreement is more symbolic than substantive. It does not lay out specific dollar amounts of aid or name programs that the Americans will support; the financing must be authorized and appropriated by Congress from year to year.
Nor does it lay out specifically what the American military and security presence will be after 2014 or what role it will play. A more detailed security agreement is to come later, perhaps in the next year, Western diplomats said, once it becomes clear how much support European nations will give to the Afghan security forces.
Even so, the United States expects to make substantial contributions toward the cost of Afghanistan’s security forces beyond 2014. A total figure for the United States of $2.7 billion a year has been discussed, and it could easily be more; there would most likely be aid for civilian programs as well.
That would be a steep reduction from the amount the United States now spends here, which has been $110 billion to $120 billion a year since the “surge” in American troop levels began in 2010, according to the Congressional Research Service.
For the partnership to work, the Afghan government must follow through with political reforms, particularly in fighting corruption, said Brian Katulis, a national security expert at the Center for American Progress. “U.S. taxpayers have seen tens of millions of their dollars wasted by a corrupt and ineffective Afghan government over the past decade,” Mr. Katulis said. “Any transition plan needs to demand more responsibility from our Afghan partners.”
Officials declined Sunday to release the text of the draft strategic partnership deal or comment on it in detail. “Until the agreement is finalized, we’re not in a position to discuss the elements it contains,” said Gavin Sundwall, the American Embassy spokesman in Kabul.
“Our goal is an enduring partnership with Afghanistan that strengthens Afghan sovereignty, stability and prosperity and that contributes to the shared goal of defeating Al Qaeda and its extremist allies,” he said. “We believe the agreement supports that goal.”
The talks on the agreement were delayed repeatedly over the delicate issues of night raids by American troops and the American operation of detention facilities. Ultimately, negotiators agreed to prepare detailed side agreements on those two issues. In March the two sides signed a memorandum of understanding shifting responsibility for all detention facilities in the country to the Afghans, and earlier this month they handed final authority over night raids to Afghan security forces, who are now carrying out all raids unless American assistance is requested.
With those two issues resolved, the strategic partnership was completed quickly.
Graham Bowley contributed reporting from Kabul, and Helene Cooper and Steven Lee Myers from Washington.
Romney’s Vague and Frustrating Views on Afghanistan
Bloomberg By the Editors Apr 23, 2012
Mitt Romney’s position on the war in Afghanistan will be familiar to those who have followed him, or tried to, on health-care reform.
In both cases -- two of the biggest domestic and foreign policy issues of this year’s election campaign -- he criticizes President Barack Obama for essentially having the same policy as Romney himself.
In the case of health care, Romney, as governor of Massachusetts, led the way to enactment of a plan centered on the notorious (to Republicans, anyway) “individual mandate.” He even offered to advise Obama on how a similar plan might be implemented nationally. Romney now says the Obama plan, individual mandate and all, is dreadful, and he promises to stop the whole thing in its tracks his first day as president.
In the case of the war in Afghanistan, started by President George W. Bush and pursued with determination by Obama, Romney has not reversed his former views, possibly because he is new to the foreign policy game and has no former views. His current views, insofar as they can be divined, again appear almost identical to Obama’s -- and where they’re not, are contradictory.
Both men favor a deadline for withdrawal of American troops. Both say that deadline should be the end of 2014. Both acknowledge that some small number of troops will have to remain indefinitely. Romney has also said, as Obama has not, that full withdrawal should happen only when U.S. generals approve or “as soon as that mission is complete.”
So is Romney in favor of full withdrawal by 2014 or is he not? If anything is clear in Afghanistan, it is that the U.S. mission will not be complete by the end of 2014. As president, Romney would face the same dismaying choice that Obama faces: He could pull out our troops and end the war by the deadline (or earlier, as we have advocated). That could risk appearing -- and not just appearing -- to slink away in humiliation. Or, he could stay until “the mission is complete,” which could be many years or even never.
What happens if, as has happened with every other Western mission to civilize Afghanistan in recent centuries, we fail to accomplish our mission in the time we have set for it? Romney says that setting a deadline for withdrawal is a gift to our enemies. They now know that they just have to hold out for a couple more years in a war that has been going on since 2001. If the Obama administration didn’t set a deadline, Republicans would accuse them of failing to have an “exit strategy” in Afghanistan.
Romney -- who, as we know from other issues, has the entire spectrum of possible opinions available to him -- has not clearly said where he stands. This is a policy question, not a military one. “Leave it to the generals” is not an acceptable answer in our democracy.
“We should not negotiate with the Taliban,” Romney says. “We should defeat the Taliban.” On this one aspect of the perplexing Afghanistan war, there is a real disagreement, because the Obama administration is in fact negotiating, albeit episodically, with the Taliban.
This is pretty appalling, but so are all the other options. Of course we should defeat the Taliban. We also should cure world hunger. You don’t get credit for wishing. The U.S. has spent nearly 11 years so far, not to mention hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of young lives, trying to defeat the Taliban. How much American blood and treasure is Romney prepared to spend?
To contact the Bloomberg View editorial board: view@bloomberg.net.
US congressman refused entry to Afghanistan over criticisms of Karzai
Renewed tension between Washington and Kabul after Afghan president tells Dana Rohrabacher he would not be welcome
Guardian.co.uk By Ewen MacAskill in Washington and Emma Graham-Harrison in Kabul Sunday 22 April 2012
Relations between the US and Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, came under renewed strain after a senior Congressman highly critical of the Kabul government was barred from entering Afghanistan.
Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, Republican chairman of the House foreign affairs subcommittee on oversight and investigation, has been an outspoken opponent of Karzai. Rohrabacher has engaged with other Afghan leaders about a more decentralised form of government for Afghanistan and called for a US investigation into alleged government corruption.
He had been leading a delegation to Afghanistan but was stopped in Dubai on Friday on his way to Kabul. The other members of the delegation had visas for Afghanistan but Rohrabacher did not.
According to his press spokeswoman, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, personally intervened to convey a message from Karzai that the congressman would not be welcome and asking him not to continue to Kabul.
Rohrabacher was still in Dubai on Sunday but scheduled to depart on Monday.
Karzai has repeatedly infuriated the Obama administration with his sharp public criticism of the US, even as Washington spends billions of dollars on security and aid in Afghanistan.
Blocking entry to a member of Congress adds to the growing tally of incidents that have strained ties.
"This doesn't look great a month before Chicago," a senior diplomat in Kabul said.
Nato is due to hold discussions at the Chicago summit next month on future relations with Afghanistan, and the US and its allies are expected to seal an agreement for long-term funding of the Afghan police and army.
Tara Olivia Setmayer, communications director for Rohrabacher, said: "Karzai told the state department he was not welcome and secretary Clinton personally conveyed that sentiment to Mr Rohrabacher and asked him not to continue on to Kabul with his fellow members. Out of respect, he obliged."
Setmayer said Rohrabacher had been a vocal critic of government corruption and "the US's failed strategy of foisting a western-style democracy from a central government in Kabul. He has advocated involving the former Northern Alliance factions in the government, much to the chagrin of Karzai."
Rohrabacher has been in discussion with Afghan leaders for several months about a less centralised form of government. In January the Afghan foreign ministry criticised what they saw as interference by the congressman in Afghanistan's domestic affairs, after a meeting with several opposition leaders in Berlin.
Rohrabacher has had a long and colourful association with Afghanistan dating back to the 1980s when he accompanied mujahideen forces fighting the Soviet Union. He became personal friends with many of the commanders who, with the support of US forces, toppled the Taliban government. Among them was Uzbek leader Abdul Rashid Dostum with whom Rohrabacher remains in dialogue, and whom the delegation met on Sunday.
10 years in Afghanistan - what did we achieve?
ABC Online By Mungo MacCallum 23 April 2012
So after more than 10 tortuous years, we finally have an exit strategy for Afghanistan – a firm (well, more or less) date for bringing our troops (well, most of them) home (well, for the moment at least).
Actually we have had one for quite some time: our exit strategy has always been 'as soon as bloody possible', which in practice has meant 'about two nanoseconds after Washington gives us the green light'. And that signal has now been given.
It is easy to be cynical about the timing: Barack Obama has set the timetable as he is launching into a difficult election year, and of course Julia Gillard faces an even tougher test at the polls in 2013 – when she hopes and believes most of the Australian troops will be welcomed home and the ones left behind will be out of the firing line and therefore largely out of harm's way.
But in fact the revised schedule has been set less by politics than by operational reality. There is a growing conviction among the military that the situation on the ground now is about as good as it is ever going to get, and with antagonism between the Afghans, both military and civilian, and the foreign forces now reaching levels so fierce as to occasionally become murderous, not much can be achieved by hanging in there.
It is time to declare victory, and leave – not a withdrawal, but what we now call a transition. But to what?
No one really believes that Afghan forces are ready to take over the defence of the country, or even that they really want to; no one believes that the government in Kabul is other than weak and corrupt and that president Hamid Karzai will not sell out to the Taliban (or anyone else) in order to preserve his personal advantage, if not his life.
And no one any longer pretends that Afghanistan is now, or probably ever will be, on the way to becoming a functioning democracy. If this mad adventure has done nothing else, it must surely have convinced the Americans that their 20th century ambition of imposing regime change on recalcitrant nations through invasion and occupation has become an unrealisable fantasy.
Yet it started so well; after World War II the defeated dictatorships fell into line with amazing alacrity. Germany (well, the half occupied by the Americans) and Italy swiftly resumed their pre-war parliamentary systems, with Germany, in particular, becoming something of a role model for the social democrats of the world.
OK, they had always been part of the Western tradition; but how about Japan, whose near-feudalism was fully democratised in less than a generation?
True, but it had been virtually obliterated as a vital part of the process. When the American occupation began, the country was effectively a political blank: the only remaining link with the past was the emperor, now no more than a conduit to repeat (or rather proclaim) the orders of General Douglas Macarthur to an utterly subservient populace.
In other words, yes, you can impose your chosen system on any country, if you're prepared to drop a couple of nukes first. But since America is no longer the only country that has them, this option has become unacceptably risky.
And every attempt since to export the American way by force of arms - in South America, in Asia, and particularly in the Middle East - has ended in tears.
Even most neo-cons now reluctantly accept that democracy cannot be enforced from outside; that it has to be embraced by the people themselves to give it even half a chance. And when it does evolve, it is usually as a result of uprisings against despotic regimes which have been both long-lasting (and therefore stable) and, importantly, secular.
This was the case in South Africa, in the communist states of Europe, in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and now Syria.
In some instances it has worked and in others it may yet work; in at least one case (Iran, where a secular dictatorship was replaced by an even more brutal religious one) it has obviously not. But it seems to be the only way.
As Marxists used to accept that capitalism, distasteful as it was, was a necessary step between feudalism and socialism, so Americans may have to learn that a Hussein, a Gaddafi or an Assad is needed as a catalyst towards democracy.
And when the push for democracy emerges, it can certainly use a little help from its friends in the outside world, but not, repeat not, an armed invasion, still less prolonged occupation.
Both sides will eventually turn against the interlopers, becoming what are quaintly described as 'insurgents' (hey, they're the ones that live there) until the foreigners leave – at which point, of course, they become freedom-fighters, liberators.
In fact, the foreign forces may well do more to upset the progress towards democracy than to help. Arguably, that has been another legacy of Afghanistan.
So, apart from this hard lesson, what has been achieved? At least the original war aims have been realised: Osama bin Laden is dead and Al Qaeda has been dispersed, although certainly not dispatched.
But that's about it. In the process Pakistan has become less stable and less predictable, and as a nuclear power far more dangerous than Afghanistan ever was or will be. And of course in Afghanistan itself it will be business as usual, constant tribal warfare with the Taliban the only force with a hope of final victory.
A grim prognosis, and one that hasn't really changed in the last 10 years, years which have seen 32 more Australian sacrificed to ill-thought-out American adventurism.
Next time we might look past all the pseudo-patriotic bombast, the sanctimonious blather, and realise that there was only ever one sensible way to support our troops in Afghanistan: bring them home.
McManus: A smaller, smarter military
The best-equipped army in the world can still lose a war if it doesn't understand the people it's fighting.
Los Angles Times By Doyle McManus Op-Ed April 22, 2012
President Obama has called a halt to the decade-long rise in defense spending that began after Sept. 11, and has proposed shrinking the Army and Marine Corps by about 14%.
Congressional Republicans (not to mention Mitt Romney) say that would be disastrous and that it could jeopardize American troops abroad.
But the military brass has stood behind Obama — literally. When the president announced his proposals, the Joint Chiefs of Staff lined up behind him in the Pentagon's briefing room. There has been no audible dissent from the officer corps.
Last week I sat down with the chief of the service that's taking the deepest hits, Gen. Raymond T. Odierno of the Army, to try to see the budget issues from a soldier's perspective.
His take? He doesn't relish shrinking the Army he has served in since 1972, but he accepts the need for a cap on spending growth.
"In all the learning I've ever done since I was a cadet at West Point, one of the things I found out is that the underpinning of any strong society is its economic capability and its political system," he said.
"It's essential that we do play [a part] in helping to get our budget right, to get our economy moving, to ensure that we reduce spending. And that's what we're doing.
"Would I have rather seen the budget cuts a bit less? Probably," he said, suggesting that the Army might come back next year and ask for some spending to be restored.
The Army is slated to shrink by 80,000 troops, more than any other service. But Odierno points out that the Army also grew more than any other branch of the armed forces during the last decade. The proposed cuts would still leave the Army slightly larger than it was in 2001, with 490,000 active-duty troops.
"Some people say, well, the Army is the loser. In my mind I call it a rebalancing," he said. "We're now bringing our end strength back to where I think it needs to be. I feel comfortable with that."
Ask this bull-necked artillery officer what new initiatives get him excited, and he doesn't talk about new tanks or combat helicopters; in this budget, the Army isn't getting them.
Instead, he talks about a new doctoral program to train officers in strategic planning, and he talks about educating more officers to become experts on Asia and the Middle East, about "cultural awareness" and "the human domain."
One of the chief lessons he learned during his three combat tours in Iraq, Odierno said, is that the best-equipped army in the world can still lose a war if it doesn't understand the people it's fighting.
"There's so much we don't know," he said.
When Odierno first arrived in Iraq during the U.S. invasion in 2003, he thought his mission was straightforward: to hunt down Saddam Hussein and the remnants of his regime. He led his 4th Infantry Division in massive sweeps of the Sunni provinces north of Baghdad and captured thousands of prisoners, including Hussein.
But that overwhelming-force, take-many-prisoners style of campaign didn't lead to peace and democracy; instead, it helped stir up the insurgency against U.S. forces that exploded in 2004.
Odierno initially defended his muscular strategy, but he decided on reflection that he was wrong and that a more sophisticated form of counterinsurgency aimed at winning Iraqis' trust and allegiance would have been a far better approach.
In 2006, Odierno and other military leaders changed course, forming an alliance with former insurgents in Anbar province and launching a surge in Baghdad. These initiatives helped bring the war under control.
The important thing, he concluded, was "understanding the environment, understanding the fabric that's beneath a society" — knowledge he didn't have when he arrived in Iraq in 2003.
If Army officers know more about the countries where they fight, in other words, they can do counterinsurgency better, and with fewer troops.
"The more we understand the human domain, the less people it will take," he said.
Odierno's emphasis on regional expertise also informs the approach he thinks the Pentagon should take in Asia, as the Obama administration shifts the focus of foreign policy toward the Pacific, where the Navy has historically ruled.
"Seven out of 10 of the world's largest land armies are in Asia," he points out. "In every country, the predominant service is the army." If the United States wants to build relationships with Asian military establishments, the officers who will have the easiest time doing that will come from the U.S. Army, he says.
Up to now, history has remembered generals by the campaigns they fought. By that measure, Odierno has already made his mark through the successful surge in Iraq he helped orchestrate.
But ultimately, he may be remembered primarily for something less dramatic but more important: using the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan to create a smaller but smarter force.
If he can pull that off, he'll deserve the oil portrait he's already guaranteed on the wall of the Pentagon's Army corridor.
doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com
Afghan carpet industry is threadbare
By Mushtaq Mojaddidi AFP 22/04/2012
For decades Ismail Temorzada's handmade Afghan carpets decorated people's homes around the world, but export problems and competition from Iran's machine-made products have left his business threadbare.
"My carpet sales are down, no one is buying hand-made carpets anymore," says Temorzada, 45, who has run a shop for more than 20 years in Kabul's once crowded and colourful Chicken Street bazaar.
"Iranian machine-made carpets are imported to Afghanistan at a cheaper price," he told AFP, dismissing them as lacking originality, durability and charm.
But they are cheap and people buy them, and his sales have dropped by 70 percent over the past year, he says.
Carpets are Afghanistan's best known export, woven mostly by women in the north of the country.
Displaying his best carpets, from Andkhoy in northern Faryab province, Temorzada said they cost 60,000 Afghanis -- about $1,300 -- but nobody is buying them now.
He wants the government to ban the importation of machine-made carpets from Iran -- or at least impose a steep hike in the import duty.
"Recently, Afghan carpet businessmen had a meeting with President Hamid Karzai and the president told us that if we ban their carpets then they will ban all their products to Afghanistan.
"If we cannot ban the Iranian machine-made carpets we should increase the duty on the product from $10 a metre to $100, so that they cannot be imported to Afghanistan in great numbers and slowly will be reduced."
Temorzada also wants the government of the landlocked and war-torn country to help the industry export its own products directly to clients around the world.
At the moment, transport problems mean that most carpets are sent to neighbouring Pakistan for washing and cutting and are often then shipped abroad under Pakistani labels.
Afghan carpet making used to employ directly or indirectly six million people, or a fifth of the country's population, according to the export promotion agency of Afghanistan -- but that figure has dropped sharply.
"The Afghan carpet industry is totally dependent on the international market," Mohammad Zarif Yadgari, deputy director of the Afghan Carpet Exporters' Guild told AFP.
"There is no direct access (to sell) abroad -- if we export carpets they will be sent abroad from Pakistan through middlemen."
The value of carpet exports fell from $262 million in 2007 to $149 million in 2008, according to the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce and Industries (ACCI).
In 2010, nearly 400,000 square metres of carpets worth $48 million were sold, but this dropped by half last year.
However, while some businesses suffer, others are thriving.
"Since I brought Iranian machine-made carpets my business has boomed," said Kabul carpet dealer Mohammad Muzamil Yousufzai.
"Because they are cheap and are sold at a reasonable price everyone can afford to buy them.
The Afghan government says it is making moves to help local carpet makers.
"The government has started work on the construction of industrial parks for carpet businessmen for washing and scissoring," Motasil Komaki, deputy commerce and industries minister, told AFP.
Describing carpets as "Afghanistan's national industry", he said the parks would initially be built in four provinces -- Faryab, Balkh, Herat and Jawzjan.
Weaving carpets was a main source of income for the millions of Afghans who fled to neighbouring Pakistan during Afghanistan's years of war, notably the 1990s civil conflict that was followed by Taliban rule.
About 80 percent of the exiles have returned home since the ouster of the Taliban government in 2001 and now a large portion of Pakistan's carpets are made in Afghanistan but sold as Pakistani, according to government figures.
Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, can ill afford to lose its main industry. Its economy has been supported by huge infusions of Western cash for the past decade as 130,000 US-led NATO troops help President Hamid Karzai's government fight a Taliban insurgency.
Kabul this month saw its biggest coordinated militant attacks in 10 years of war, leaving 51 dead after explosions and gunfire rocked the capital in a brutal reminder of how severe the security threat is.
But the troops are due to leave by the end of 2014, and the economy is expected to be hit hard.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com